Dancing the SAMBA: An Introduction to Living with Windows

Setting up shares

The most common samba setup is sharing user's home directories. This is done using the special [homes] share. Other shares may also be defined by specifying additional sections.

The following options are common for shares:

• path specifies the directory to share. For the [homes] share it's usually best not to define path, but if you do, use %S to reference the username of the user. This allows creating different homedirs for the local and remote access.
• comment specifies a user-viewable name for the share.
• read only allows defining access restrictions for a share. Default is read-only. Set to no in order to allow write access.
• guest ok allows access without a password using the guest account. DO NOT use this with the [homes] share, or all users will be able to access others' home directories.
• valid users specifies the names of users that will have access to the share. Defaults to all users.
• browsable specifies whether the share will be listed when you browse the server. Defaults to yes, but should be set to no for the [homes] share, as it hides the special [homes] share, and not the specific user shares.
• user specifies the user name to use if security = SHARE.

Alon Altman